Georg Büchner LEONCE AND LENA

sheer self-pity.
VALERIO: [gives him a glass.]: Take this bell, this diver's bell, and sink into a sea of
wine so it froths and sparkles above your head. See, above the delicate bloom of the wine,
the hovering elves with shoes of gold and tinkling cymbals.
LEONCE [jumping up]: Come on, Valerio, we must do something, we must do
something! Let's busy ourselves with profound thoughts. Let's consider the serious
question of why a chair stays standing on three legs but not on two, and why we wipe our
noses with our fingers and not with our feet, like the flies. Come, let's anatomise ants and
count the filaments of flowers - I shall yet contrive to embrace some princely pastime or
other! I shall yet discover some infantile bauble that only drops from my fingers when I turn
up my toes. I still have a sizeable dose of enthusiasm to use up - but once I've got it all
nicely warmed, it takes me an eternity to find a suitable spoon, and in the meantime it's all
gone cold again.
VALERIO: Ergo bibamus? This bottle is neither demanding lover nor mere idea,
causes no birth-pains, never gets boring and never unfaithful, is consistently the same
from first drop to last. Break its seal, and all the slumbering dreams within it burst forth to
greet you.
LEONCE: O God! I'll give half my life to prayer if you grant me but a single straw to
clutch at and ride like a mighty stallion until the day I'm laid on straw myself - What a
strange, uncanny evening. Down below, a perfect stillness; up above, the fleeting, shifting
clouds, the sun appearing, disappearing. See those strange figures up there all chasing
one another, those long white shadows with terrifying match stick legs and batlike wings -
and all such swirling turmoil, while down below nothing stirs, not a leaf, not a single blade
of grass. The earth has curled into a ball of fear, like a stricken child, and above its cradle
the ghosts go marching.
VALERIO: I don't know what you're on about, I'm in a lovely mood, perfectly lovely.
The sun looks like an inn sign, the fiery clouds above it are its legend: 'The Golden Sun'.
The earth and river down there are like a wine-splashed table, and we're lying upon it like
playing-cards that God and the Devil are having a game with out of pure boredom. You're
the King, I'm the Knave, all we need is a Queen, a beautiful Queen with a great big heart
adorning her chest and a very long nose sentimentally buried in a mighty tulip [ enter the
GOVERNESS and the PRINCESS] and - by God, there she is! But it's not really a tulip, it's
a pinch of snuff, and it's not really a nose, it's a giant proboscis. [ To the Governess] Why,
dear lady, do you stride so fast that we can see your once-comely calves all the way up to
your supremely respectable garters?
GOVERNESS [stops, extremely angry.] Why, dear Sir, do you Open your trap so
wide that you make a hole in the outlook?
VALERIO: So that you, dear lady, don't bloody your nose by colliding with the
horizon. Thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh towards Damascus?
LENA [to the Governess.]: Dearest, tell me, is the way so long?
LEONCE [dreaming to himself]: Oh, every way is long! The ticking death-watch in
our breast is slow, each drop of blood is measured in its pace, our entire life's a creeping
fever. For tired feet, every way is lung . . .
LENA [who has listened to him with anxious thoughtfulness]: And for tired eyes
every light's too harsh, for tired lips every breath too hard, [ smiling] for tired ears every
word too much. [Enters the inn with the Governess.]
LEONCE: Oh, dear Valerio, couldn't Hamlet's words be mine as well; 'Would not
this, sir, and a forest of feathers, with two Provençal roses on my razed shoes, get me a
fellowship in a cry of players? 1 do think I said it, with perfect melancholy. Thank God I'm
beginning to be delivered of my melancholy. The air is no longer so clear and cold, the